Actress Halle Berry says she has been “eternally miffed” that no black woman has won the Best Actress award at the Oscars since her big win for the 2002 film, Monster’s Ball, a fact she thinks screams of racism.
To date, Berry is the only black woman to ever win the Oscar for Best Actress. In fact, only one other “woman of color” has won the top Oscar at all and that was in 2022 when Michelle Yeoh won for Everything Everywhere All at Once, according to Variety. And, not incidentally, Yeoh is the only Asian woman to ever win a Best Actress award.
In all, 11 black women have taken home an Oscar stretching back to the Academy’s first, Hattie McDaniel, who won Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Gone with the Wind in 1940.
But to Berry this is all very disheartening.
“I’m still eternally miffed that no Black woman has come behind me for that best actress Oscar, I’m continually saddened by that year after year,” Berry told Marie Claire. “And it’s certainly not because there has been nobody deserving.”
This is not the first time Berry has questioned the lack of black women on the list of the Academy’s top honors. In 2020, Berry told Variety she thought there have been plenty of black women who have deserved the recognition, adding, “I hoped they would have, but why it hasn’t gone that way, I don’t have the answer.”
Halle Berry makes an emotional acceptance speech after receiving the Best Actress Award for her role in “Monster’s Ball,” during the 74Th Annual Academy Awards March 24, 2002 in Hollywood, Ca. (Getty)
Berry insisted Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Cynthia Erivo’s turn in Harriet, and Ruth Negga in Loving were all worthy candidates for the Oscar.
The Catwoman star also said it has been one of her “biggest heartbreaks” her win did not open the door for other black women to follow her as a Best Actress Award winner.
“The morning after, I thought, ‘Wow, I was chosen to open a door.’ And then, to have no one … I question, ‘Was that an important moment, or was it just an important moment for me?'” Berry told the paper. “I wanted to believe it was so much bigger than me. It felt so much bigger than me, mainly because I knew others should have been there before me and they weren’t…just because I won an award doesn’t mean that, magically, the next day, there was a place for me. I was just continuing to forge a way out of no way.”
In fact, she is so disheartened by the turn of events since she accepted her award in 2002 she thinks her own award has been rendered meaningless.
In 2017 she despaired, saying her Oscar “really meant nothing. It meant nothing. I thought it meant something, but I think it meant nothing.”
The Academy attempted to address the racial issue by adding “diversity quotas” in 2020. And that was on top of the changes to membership rules to include more blacks after the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite movement was launched.
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